I had a great time hanging out with the family – especially his mother. Carole King played Joaquin’s mother in the film – I think I’m getting her role correct – and she kept attempting to horn in on the interview with the family and really got on my nerves, bless her heart. I found her rather needy but then realized she was not in her element and felt out-of-place on a movie set and probably was needy. I should have been more empathetic as I look back on it all now. The Phoenix’s mother seemed to wish she had a bit more empathy for her, too, if I remember that correctly as well.

Another photo I had for years from that visit to the Phoenix family down there was a beautiful portrait of all the Phoenix siblings standing on a beach as if they were walking on water at low tide. When I was doing a cover story years later for Vanity Fair on Liv Tyler, who was dating Joaquin then, I gave it to her to give to him after I had told him about it on a phone call we had had about Liv. He later called to thank me for the photo. He was so sweet in my interactions with him, even breaking down in tears when expressing his gratitude for that photo I gave him.

It was a kind of enchanted time for that family, I think, when they were all together in paradise before it disappeared into a horizon that will forever hover over the haze of River. I am grateful that I – a stranger, an interloper, an addict who understands what it is like to lose enchantment and find the firmer ground of recovery that replaces it – was able to share that more innocent time with them all. Each time I see Joaquin, I think of of that time before his beloved brother became a haze in his life, that lovely time when he was Leaf, when horizons held not darkness but the hope of more light yet to come.

Here’s to light. And to the Leaf that still lives in the man.